21 – Al-Ḥusayn narrated to us; ʿAbd Allah narrated to us; he said: my father, may Allah have mercy on him, narrated to me, from Hishām ibn Muḥammad; he said: a man of the Nakhaʿ tribe told me, on the authority of Ṣāliḥ ibn Maytham, who said:

On the night before that fateful night, while ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib was going around awakening the people for the dawn prayer, Ibn Muljam came to him with a rolled parchment in which he either invited him or challenged him. ʿAlī opened it but did not look at its contents; he kept it until he had prayed, then opened it again, and there it read: “I call you to repent from polytheism, and I renounce you. Indeed, Allah does not guide the schemes of the treacherous.”

ʿAlī then said, “Who is the author of this parchment?” When no one answered him, he spat on it, erased the writing, threw it aside, and said, “May Allah’s curse be upon him.”